At the UI Aberdeen Research and Extension Center, an hour’s drive from Pocatello, you won’t find shimmering lap lanes, matched sets of spinning exercycles, or glass-paneled weight rooms. But that didn’t discourage the staff and faculty from responding with their own fitness plan when Linda Peavey, UI benefits director, volunteered her help. Soon after she got their call, Peavey was sending 40 pedometers and water bottles to the Bingham County outpost, and the folks at Aberdeen were snapping them on.

Management assistant Kristi Copeland stepped right up to coordinate the project. She organizes meetings, logs in the number of steps that willing participants report, and records their weights from the station’s precise seedhouse scale. The goal: 10,000 steps per day, one million steps per person.

Pacesetter Leland Sorensen, a senior scientific aide, logs in about 70,000 steps a week. “I’m at that age of my life when people start to worry more about their health,” he says.

“It wasn’t very hard to sell it to people,” says Copeland. “We’re all getting older and trying to get a little more healthy. Everybody says they need to lose weight or be in better shape and, if you can do it as a group and get some support, it’s always easier.”

Tractors, family, and dogs all help
The only hard part for Aberdeen’s sneakers-on-the-ground employees has been enduring competition from their equipment-driving colleagues, who Copeland says unintentionally trigger their pedometers while riding tractors and four-wheelers. “They get off the tractors and they’ve logged 6,000 steps,” she says. Meanwhile, she and office specialist Anna Potter try to squeeze in a quick 15-minute daily walk around the station’s research fields.

Scientific aide Justin Wheeler easily racks up 10,000 steps when his workday sends him criss-crossing between labs. But when he settles down in front of his computer for a few days of writing, his steps drop off steeply to 2,000 to 3,000. Wheeler tries to make up the difference after work by hoofing it around a school track with his young family. The pedometer reading tells him whether he’ll be spending the evening on the track, in the garden, or on the couch.

When support scientist Mary Guttieri is behind in steps, her dog is the beneficiary with stepped-up evening walks. “It helps me maintain fitness,” she says, but just as importantly, “it’s good for our sense of community as a research unit.” With the hallways and sidewalks alive with the click-clacking of so many pedometers, Guttieri says it’s easier to make conversation with folks whose projects don’t typically cross paths with hers.

Peavey applauds Copeland’s enterprise in organizing the fitness plan. “All of us at the university should thank Kristi,” she says. “Keeping people active absolutely will make a difference in the cost of our self-funded health plan.”
When they reach their goal, Aberdeen’s pedometered pacers will receive honorary t-shirts. Although they’re still deciding what to print on them, wheat breeder Ed Souza already knows what he wants his to say:

“I walked a million steps and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”